Description

Laurent Fairhead wrote:
Hello all,
Sébastien, Marie-Alice and I went to Sandro's presentation. It was mainly about how they deal with querying existing databases in a distributed environment using the EGEE grid. I guess their work overlaps some of what we're wishing to do in WP4 (except the harvested CIM database that we're planning). Sébastien had a talk with Sandro Fiore after the presentation and he's apparently ready to interact with us and would be willing to develop functionalities in his system for our needs.
Their web site is here:
http://grelc.unile.it/home.php
Cheers
Laurent
Valcke Sophie wrote:
Hi,
CMCC (and Sandro Fiore) is highly involved in the IS-ENES proposal and know perfectly well about Metafor. We had a lot of discussion with them during the writing of the proposal and I think Michael and Martin Juckes (from BADC?) interacted with CMCC, technically speaking. Of course, I think it would be a good idea for Metafor WP4, WP5 and WP6 to liaise with them.
regards,
Sophie
Eric Guilyardi wrote:
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CMCC Grid Metadata Handling System
The next generation of climate modeling researchers will face a critical challenge, i.e., dealing with increasingly complex simulation models and huge quantities of related datasets, which are already too massive for current storage, manipulation, archiving, navigation, and retrieval capabilities. From the data grid perspective a key element to discover, manage and access huge and distributed amount of data will be the metadata handling framework. While from the grid data handling perspective several solutions are already available and can be adopted, for metadata management centralized solutions are usually proposed. What we propose for the management of a distributed ES production activity is the CMCC Metadata Handling System (a data grid solution leveraging distributed and P2P data grid services focusing on metadata management and access). From our point of view, centralized solutions are not feasible and are not able to address availability, scalability, robustness and efficiency at such large scale. Despite the classical approaches, data-grid-enabled solutions are able to greatly address scalability (users, data, etc.), transparency (access, integration, presentation) and efficiency (performance). The Grid Metadata Handling System we propose is able to provide both access to and integration of metadata stored in different and widespread data sources providing a strong data virtualization layer in grid. Moreover we must take into account that (i) such a technological solution for distributed metadata management leverages on standards, emerging specification, etc. (ii) supports role-based management (based on VOMS), which increases flexibility and scalability (iii) provides full support for Grid Security Infrastructure, which means (authorization, mutual authentication, data integrity, data confidentiality, etc.); (iv) is based on P2P grid protocols/services, fully addressing interoperability, data integration and transparency.
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GRelC Project
Grids encourage and promote the publication, sharing and integration of scientific data, distributed across Virtual Organizations. Scientists and researchers (bioinformatics, astrophysics, etc.) work on huge, complex and growing datasets. The complexity of data management within a grid environment comes from the distribution, heterogeneity and number of data sources. Along with coarse grained services (basically grid storages, replica services, storage resource managers, etc), there is a strong interest on fine grained ones concerning, for instance, grid-database access and management. Moreover, as grid computing, technologies and standards evolve, more mature environment (production grids such as EGEE) become available for production based activities and tools/services able to access in grid to relational databases are also strongly required.
Within the proposed talk we will describe in detail the Grid Relational Catalog (GRelC) Project, an integrated environment for grid database management, highlighting the vision/approach, architecture, components, services and technological issues.
The key topic will be the GRelC Data Access and Integration Service.
The GRelC DAIS is a GSI/VOMS enabled web service addressing extreme performance, interoperability and security. It efficiently, securely and transparently manage databases on the grid across VOs, with regard to emerging and consolidated grid standards and specifications as well as production grid middleware (gLite & Globus).
It provides a uniform access interface, in grid, both to access and integrate relational (Mysql, Oracle, Postgresql, IBM/DB2, SQLite) and non-relational data sources (XML DB engines such as eXist, XIndice and libxml2 based documents).